Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Do Sandbag

“I just crashed, I did it on purpose to get a restart, just to have the fastest ride. I did it. So it was all planned, really,” Hindes reportedly said immediately after the race. He modified his comments at the official news conference to say he lost control of his bike.”

The opposition took it in stride:

French officials did not formally complain about the British tactic.

“You have to make the most of the rules. You have to play with them in a competition and no one should complain about that,” the France team’s technical director, Isabelle Gautheron, told The Associated Press.

But,

“He (Hindes) should not have told the truth,” Daniel Morelon, a Frenchman who coaches the China team, told the AP. “It’s part of the game, but you should not tell others.”

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3 comments

Two differences (that I don’t think justifies what happened but probably have to do with differing reactions):

1. The shirking in badminton was meant to avoid a difficult opponent. That is not possible in this cycling scenario. The Brits still had to race the same French team.

2. Shirking to avoid a superior opponent is tacitly admitting inferiority and not deserving of high achievement. Bagging for a restart in cycling is tacitly DENYING inferiority: “bad start isn’t our fault; we actually can beat those guys.”

Seems concepts of unfair play are not purely rule-based: there’s an expectation that outcomes reflect ability, and gaming the system while maintaining an illusion that ability still counts are less despised than gaming that explicitly shows inferiority. (This comment feels like it should be on Robin Hanson’s blog)

Personally, I don’t get why anyone should get a restart in cycling when it’s verboten in other sports.

@Kelvin There isn’t always such thing as “superiority” and there definitely isn’t a thing like “deserving” in sports. There are match-ups and there is winning. NBA teams frequently tank games by resting their players to wind up in a particular draw of the playoffs to avoid the teams against whom they match-up poorly. Like paper scissors rock for example. Paper should tank games if it ensures that scissors and rock are in the other draw. It is smart to do so and it displays an awareness of one’s weaknesses and a commitment to winning. Even in the absence of a match-up issue, it is better to meet the Miami Heat in the conference finals rather than an earlier round, even if it doesn’t alter the odds of your winning.